Arthur Hailey Quotes

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

It was a hard time. It was something I would love to erase from my memory.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.

It is difficult to ever think about your loved one having suffered.

Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover.

In grief we know the worst of what we feel but who can tell the end of what we fear?

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she'd quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.

The worst moment of one's life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

It was the worst hurt he had ever known.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?

That agony returns; And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

When you think of love do you think of pain?

Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then... Well, then I woke up.

To be more precise it was the color of heartache.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

I never meant it," he was saying. "Never meant it to happen. Can't stand it, seeing her suffer. Must do something, do something... What do I do? What can I do...?

How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized

Something flickers across his bloodshot eyes. Pain.

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it